I think of my mother are an adven­tur­ous per­son. She thought noth­ing about pack­ing the five of us into a VW bug and head­ing to British Colum­bia. Or, when we were more grown, into a sta­tion wagon and head­ing to West Vir­ginia, or Boston.

When she wanted to revamp the kitchen cab­i­nets, but couldn’t afford to pay a pro­fes­sional to do it, she took a wood­work­ing class at the adult school, and built 18 feet of cab­i­net, with a Lazy Susan.

She was adven­tur­ous, and very prac­ti­cal about the steps required to set out on the adven­ture, and also a dreamer who some­times strug­gled when real­ity did not match her dream.

I’m going to read an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal sketch my mother wrote, prob­a­bly some time about 1983, I’m not sure when. She con­veys bet­ter than I can the blend of prac­ti­cal adven­turer and invet­er­ate dreamer she was. I think you’ll also see some of her sense of humor in her writing.

I was grad­u­ated from High School in 1945 in Sheri­dan, Wyoming a small town in north­east­ern Wyoming.

I thought about going to nurs­ing school after that, but nice girls didn’t do that — they became teach­ers or got mar­ried and raised chil­dren. So I went away to col­lege in Hast­ings, Nebraska — where I really had a ball. I think I must have majored in cam­pus­try. I took only what was inter­est­ing to me — music, French, Span­ish, and literature.

I came to Cal­i­for­nia in 1947 and fell in love with the warm weather — and no snow to shovel. I grad­u­ated from Glen­dale Col­lege in 1949, major­ing in music & lit­er­a­ture, and got married.

My hus­band was just out of the Navy, and between us we couldn’t have dug up bus fare out of town, but I started mak­ing plans. It was going to be a beau­ti­ful life: I would have a house, a car, a baby grand piano, and 5 chil­dren — not nec­es­sar­ily in that order.

My first child, a daugh­ter, was born in 1950 and by the time she was two we had a car and a house — not bad for 24 years old.

There were 4 more chil­dren in the next 13 years, another daugh­ter and 3 sons. I worked a lit­tle here & there but never steadily until 1961, when I started a busi­ness: Reseda Nurses Reg­istry, and an all med­ical tele­phone answer­ing ser­vice. I sold this busi­ness when we moved to Simi Val­ley in 1963 — I needed to spend more time with my fam­ily. In about 1965, I was con­tacted by the Pres­i­dent of CNA Dist #5 in LA about run­ning their Reg­istry for them — which I did for about 8 years.

By then I had my piano and I was ready to retire. Every­thing accord­ing to plan. I didn’t work for sev­eral years — I took piano lessons and enjoyed being home with my chil­dren. I was for­tu­nate in that I had beau­ti­ful gifted chil­dren — just like the plan — involved in music — play­ing foot­ball, drill team etc.

My old­est daugh­ter grad­u­ated from County USC School of Nurs­ing. My younger daugh­ter fin­ished high school at 16 and went to work for State Farm Insur­ance in T.O. She wanted to go to night school, but was a lit­tle shy, so I told her I would go with her, if she would pick some­thing we would both enjoy — so we took con­ver­sa­tional Spanish.

That got her started and she went on her way, and so did I — more Span­ish and piano. Then I dis­cov­ered the Simi Val­ley Adult School, where I stud­ied oil pain­ing and stained glass and cab­i­net build­ing — all rather expen­sive hob­bies —. So I took a part time job with Brent­wood Nurses Reg­istry — to sup­port my habit.

By now, my youngest daugh­ter was a full time stu­dent and always look­ing for a part time job. Finally, she took the nurse’s aide course at the Adult School and loved it. In fact, she talked me into tak­ing it. I fin­ished, but was still work­ing at the Reg­istry. Any­way, one day, Simi Doc­tors’ Hos­pi­tal called her to work and she couldn’t go — but she told them she’d send her mother. And that’s how I started work­ing in a hospital.

In 1978, my hus­band had open heart surgery (6 bypasses) — That wasn’t in my plan! — but he recov­ered nicely and was back at work in 3 weeks — so that was O.K. and I went on my merry way.

Then, in 1981 Jana was killed in a car acci­dent — that wasn’t in my plan either — and it wasn’t O.K. — I met a Catholic Priest at the hos­pi­tal who has influ­enced my life for­ever. Over the next few months I began to real­ize that I had been liv­ing in fairy­land for 52 years. Things were not always going to work out the way I had planned. Life is so frag­ile. I may not have my hus­band for­ever, indeed, I might not have him tomor­row, and I had bet­ter pre­pare myself to take care of me.

She trails off there.…

You see, mom was a coura­geous dreamer, and often, but not always, ready to take the next challenge.

Despite the fact that she dis­ap­peared from us over the last decade, I was com­forted that her adven­tur­ous dream­ing, her sense of humor, and her love of music were the last things to go.

She was born March 16, 1928 in Ord, Nebraska, the only child of Ernest Melvin Hill and Helen Kjer­s­tine John­son. Her father was a cloth­ier who lost his busi­ness in the Depres­sion and returned to farm­ing; he died when she was five. Her mother was a teacher.

She attended Sheri­dan High School (Wyoming), Hast­ings Col­lege (Nebraska), and Glen­dale Col­lege, where she received an AA degree. She majored in art and stud­ied music, lan­guages, and literature.

On Sep­tem­ber 21, 1949, she mar­ried Carl Lawrence Jones. They raised five chil­dren in the San Fer­nando Val­ley and Simi Val­ley. She started a nurse’s reg­istry, and later pur­sued arts and crafts, includ­ing paint­ing, macramé, cro­chet, knit­ting, and wood­work­ing. She liked to travel. On one of her trips, she fell in love with Albu­querque, New Mex­ico, where she retired with her hus­band. After Carl’s death in 2003, she lived with and near her chil­dren in Cal­i­for­nia, North Car­olina, and Pennsylvania.

She was pre­ceded in death by a daugh­ter, Jana Jones. She is sur­vived by four chil­dren: Jacque­line Abra­ham of Swiss­vale, Penn­syl­va­nia; Jonathan Jones of Acton; James Jones of Simi Val­ley; and Jor­dan Jones of Raleigh, North Car­olina; as well as three cousins, seven grand­chil­dren, five step grand­chil­dren, and six great grandchildren.

A com­mem­o­ra­tion will be held at 10 a.m. Wednes­day, June 4th, at the Rose Fam­ily Funeral Home, 4444 Cochran St, Simi Val­ley. Inter­ment will fol­low at Oak­wood Memo­r­ial Park, 22601 Lassen St, Chatsworth. In lieu of flow­ers, the fam­ily requests dona­tions be made to the Alzheimer’s Asso­ci­a­tion at http://act.alz.org/goto/alicejones

The best app for read­ing books is being shut down. Read­mill allowed for read­ing of DRM-free as well as Adobe and Google DRM titles on mobile apps for iOS and Android. The read­ing expe­ri­ence was crisp and clear; the app also allowed for social and shared read­ing and annotations.

“In my dream team, fan­tasy pub­lish­ing startup league, I would have had Goodreads buy Read­mill. Here are two star­tups with sim­i­larly over­lap­ping prob­lems. I under­stand why Ama­zon bought Goodreads, and why Goodreads sold itself to Ama­zon. But as a reader and lover of com­pe­ti­tion in the world of pub­lish­ing, there is a com­pelling alter­na­tive uni­verse in which a Goodreads plus Read­mill com­bi­na­tion offered us all a unique alter­na­tive to Amazon.”

Now, Read­mill has come to its Epi­logue. The Read­mill team will be join­ing Drop­box, pre­sum­ably to enable read­ing of e-books stored there, but … they are not tak­ing the Read­mill app and website.

The web­site is no longer allow­ing peo­ple to cre­ate accounts as of today, and it will shut down com­pletely, as will the avail­abil­ity of the mobile apps, on July 1, 2014.

This is a sad day for inde­pen­dent read­ers. E-books are dom­i­nated by Ama­zon, with Apple, Google, and Adobe sweep­ing up most of the remain­der. It was an impor­tant part of the e-book ecosys­tem to have a sep­a­rate (and in many ways bet­ter and cleaner) app from the dom­i­nant Ama­zon, Apple, Google, and Adobe offer­ings. Hope­fully, Drop­box will build the Read­mill tech­nol­ogy into Drop­box and pro­vide a non-content com­pany way to store and read our geneal­ogy and his­tory e-books.

The New York Times pub­lished an arti­cle yes­ter­day (“Crack­ing the Brand-New 1940 Cen­sus”), report­ing that at the New York Pub­lic Library’s Mil­stein Divi­sion of United States His­tory, Local His­tory and Geneal­ogy and the NYPL Labs have con­nected 1940 phone books to the 1940 cen­sus to help researchers locate New York­ers in the 1940 US Census.

This is a wickedly intel­li­gent way to con­cate­nate avail­able data.

The data­base allows you to start with a name and a bor­ough, find the per­son in the tele­phone direc­tory, use that to find the address, then use the address to find the 1940 US Cen­sus enu­mer­a­tion dis­trict. The site guides you through the process, includ­ing send­ing you over to Fam­il­y­Search to infor­ma­tion on the Enu­mer­a­tion Dis­trict you have discovered.

This will pro­vide quite a bit of help for researchers who still have not found fam­ily mem­bers in the 1940 US Cen­sus, either because the names are indexed incor­rectly, or because there are “too many hits.”

The national tragedy of Sandy Hook School in New­town, Con­necti­cut has shocked the coun­try. The incred­i­ble loss makes me almost speechless.NPR’s Sto­ryCorps cov­ered a Michi­gan school bomb­ing, inter­view­ing sur­vivors of the May 18, 1927 attack on a school in rural Bath, Michi­gan.

Forty-five died in that bomb­ing. What you hear in the Sto­ryCorps record­ing, is how people’s lives were affected. How, even 70 years later, the mem­o­ries of a fam­ily and a com­mu­nity can cen­ter on a sin­gle hor­rific moment when so much changed for so many.

Sey­mour Win­ston, he last liv­ing wit­ness to the assas­si­na­tion of Abra­ham Lin­coln appeared on the TV show “I’ve Got a Secret” on 9 Feb­ru­ary 1956. As made sense at the time, they offered him a car­ton of cig­a­rettes, but he requested pipe tobacco.…

The show’s pro­duc­ers knew of Mr. Win­ston because of an arti­cle that had appeared in The Amer­i­can Weekly.

Update: It seems that the Gov­er­nor of Geor­gia has found a way to return fund­ing to the Geor­gia Archives.

In a move intended to save money, the Geor­gia Archives will be closed to the pub­lic, start­ing 1 Novem­ber 2012. You can read a copy of the Geor­gia Sec­re­tary of State’s let­ter about the clos­ing at the Records Preser­va­tion and Access Com­mit­tee (RPAC) web­site. (RPAC is a joint com­mit­tee of the Fed­er­a­tion of Genealog­i­cal Soci­eties, the National Genealog­i­cal Soci­ety [of which I am the President-Elect], and the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion of Jew­ish Genealog­i­cal Soci­eties (IAJGS)).

The archives has be on restricted hours as it is, being open only 17 hours per week (Fri­day and Sat­ur­day, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.), but clos­ing down com­pletely, is a blow that will be hard to recover from for fam­ily his­tory researchers and other his­to­ri­ans. Under this sce­nario, there would be a lim­ited avail­abil­ity for the pub­lic to sched­ule access to the archives, but, since these archives are Geor­gia state pub­lic prop­erty, many Geor­gians are mak­ing their opin­ions known in a Face­book group (Geor­gians Against Clos­ing the State Archives) and via a peti­tion: “The Gov­er­nor of GA: Leave our state archives open to the pub­lic.”

Access to records of his­tor­i­cal and genealog­i­cal impor­tance is cur­rently under siege in many states and fed­er­ally. There have been sev­eral attempts to limit access to what have been and should remain pub­lic records. Many of these attempts are well-intentioned, but misinformed.

As an exam­ple, pub­lic access to SSDI (the Social Secu­rity Death Index) is under threat because it was used to by crim­i­nals to claim as depen­dents recently deceased chil­dren. This was a rep­re­hen­si­ble act that caused the fam­i­lies of those chil­dren to go through IRS scrutiny, as well as hav­ing endured the loss of a child. How­ever, the point of these records being pub­lic is to avert fraud. Had the IRS been val­i­dat­ing against these records, they would have dis­cov­ered the fraud imme­di­ately, and with­out con­tact­ing families.

It may seem easy to mis­con­strue geneal­ogy as a sim­ple hobby with no real neces­sity, but clos­ing records not only affects hob­by­ists, but also pro­fes­sion­als, many of whom are act­ing on behalf of courts as foren­sic geneal­o­gists, or attempt­ing to find next of kin of fallen sol­diers. Pro­fes­sional qual­ity research can also be valu­able to under­stand a family’s med­ical his­tory, which can improve the value of health care and reduce its cost.

Geneal­o­gists are just as con­cerned about iden­tity theft as any­one, and have strict stan­dards designed to pro­mote pro­fes­sional con­duct even of ama­teur researchers, and these include stan­dards for main­tain­ing the pri­vacy for liv­ing persons.

For exam­ple, NGS has NGS Stan­dards for Shar­ing Infor­ma­tion with Oth­ers, which state, in part: “respon­si­ble fam­ily his­to­ri­ans con­sis­tently … con­vey per­sonal iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion about liv­ing peo­ple — like age, home address, occu­pa­tion or activ­i­ties — only in ways that those con­cerned have expressly agreed to.” Addi­tion­ally, the Board for Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Geneal­o­gists has a Code of Ethics, to which all Cer­ti­fied Geneal­o­gists must adhere. It states: “I will keep con­fi­den­tial any per­sonal or genealog­i­cal infor­ma­tion given to me, unless I receive writ­ten con­sent to the contrary.”

The Records Preser­va­tion and Access Com­mit­tee (RPAC), a joint com­mit­tee of the Fed­er­a­tion of Genealog­i­cal Soci­eties, the National Genealog­i­cal Soci­ety, and the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion of Jew­ish Genealog­i­cal Soci­eties (IAJGS) advo­cates for pri­vacy and access issues on behalf of the genealog­i­cal com­mu­nity. To keep up to date on records access issues, fol­low the RPACRSS feed, or visit the RPAC web­site.

Apple announced on Thurs­day their lat­est play to dom­i­nate the edu­ca­tion mar­ket. From its incep­tion, Apple has been focused on edu­ca­tion as a mar­ket. They have con­sis­tently pro­vided spe­cial dis­counts to edu­ca­tors and stu­dents, and they have devel­oped a series of education-friendly appli­ca­tions and products.

Within iTunes, Apple has long had iTunes U, a col­lec­tion of free audio and video of instruc­tional mate­ri­als from col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties around the world, includ­ing Stan­ford, Har­vard, Yale, and Oxford. On Thurs­day, they announced that iTunes U was sep­a­rat­ing from the rest of iTunes, and being given its own app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Addi­tion­ally, Apple is allow­ing K-12 school dis­tricts the abil­ity to pro­vide con­tent through the app. (How they will help those school dis­tricts or their stu­dents afford the devices required to view this con­tent is not made clear, though many have spec­u­lated that Apple will offer deep dis­counts for large pur­chases. Even so, this seems to be an offer for another day, but per­haps as prices come down and the econ­omy recov­ers, some oppor­tu­ni­ties for this will open up.)

The most impres­sive part of the iTunes U app is how closely it mir­rors the best aspects of a good learn­ing man­age­ment sys­tem. It’s easy to nav­i­gate and to find con­tent, as you would sus­pect, but it’s no longer only a col­lec­tion of pod­casts. Now, iTunes U uses a binder motif, where the tabs include:

Info — defin­ing the course in a para­graph or two.

Posts — usu­ally hav­ing a brief sum­mary of a class, along with check boxes allow­ing you to keep track of the progress you have made, and links to the lec­ture on video or audio and the readings

Notes — where all the notes you take on the mate­ri­als or in related books are available

Mate­ri­als — where you can get to all the video, audio, books (some­times from the iBook­store, some­times in print-only copies from Ama­zon, some­times via links to exter­nal repos­i­to­ries such as Jstor.

What Apple is doing here is remark­able. They are cre­at­ing an infra­struc­ture where you can learn, with a min­i­mum of depar­ture from Apple’s ecosys­tem of hard­ware and its con­tent vend­ing ser­vices. The ben­e­fit to the con­sumer is con­ver­gence: notes taken in the e-book you bought from the iBook­store as part of your class are next to your notes about the lec­ture. The ben­e­fits to Apple are in keep­ing peo­ple locked into buy­ing their hard­ware, and also their con­tent. Geneal­ogy edu­ca­tion is going to be mov­ing in this direc­tion, though it remains to see how quickly.

Another thing that Apple announced on Thurs­day is iBooks 2 for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This app can now dis­play a new type of mul­ti­me­dia book. While this could be used for any con­tent, Apple is focus­ing on the text­book mar­ket. See their adver­tise­ment if you want to hear their pitch about this. They tout the cost sav­ings (most are priced at $14.95), the weight dif­fer­ence (we have all seen the mas­sive books chil­dren labor to carry back and forth to school), and the pos­si­bil­i­ties of engag­ing stu­dents. I’m not sure how the pric­ing model will work for these pub­lish­ers, though I do think some kind of sub­scrip­tion model could flat­ten out pur­chases that with phys­i­cal books cover a 5 year period, into some kind of annual fee for updat­ing elec­tronic text books with no ship­ping and ware­house expenses.

The launch included 8 books by McGraw-Hill, Pear­son Edu­ca­tion, and Houghton Mif­flin Har­court, who together account for 90% of the K-12 text­books in the United States. These books, as shown by a free copy of E. O. Wilson’s Life on Earth: An Intro­duc­tion, are com­pletely dif­fer­ent from books you have seen before. They include video, audio voice overs, images that read­ers can inter­act with, charts that can be re-spun to dis­play infor­ma­tion from a dif­fer­ent perspective.…

Finally, Apple has released a free prod­uct that will help get con­tent into their iBook­store. The app, which runs on the Mac OS, is called iBooks Author. It is easy to cre­ate high-presentation qual­ity mul­ti­me­dia books using iBooks Author. It’s as easy to use as Apple’s other con­tent cre­ation tools in iWork. The catch with the prod­uct is the End-User License Agree­ment (EULA). Most EULAs are designed to limit the lia­bil­ity of a soft­ware com­pany to any­thing that might hap­pen to you if the soft­ware stops func­tion­ing or loses your data. How­ever, this EULA includes the fol­low­ing (as sec­tion 1B, high­lights are mine):

B. Dis­tri­b­u­tion of your Work. As a con­di­tion of this License and pro­vided you are in com­pli­ance with its terms, your Work may be dis­trib­uted as follows:

(i) if your Work is pro­vided for free (at no charge), you may dis­trib­ute the Work by any avail­able means;

(ii) if your Work is pro­vided for a fee (includ­ing as part of any subscription-based prod­uct or ser­vice), you may only dis­trib­ute the Work through Apple and such dis­tri­b­u­tion is sub­ject to the fol­low­ing lim­i­ta­tions and con­di­tions: (a) you will be required to enter into a sep­a­rate writ­ten agree­ment with Apple (or an Apple affil­i­ate or sub­sidiary) before any com­mer­cial dis­tri­b­u­tion of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may deter­mine for any rea­son and in its sole dis­cre­tion not to select your Work for distribution.

So, if you sell works cre­ated with iBooks Author, you can only do so through Apple, and you can only do so if they agree to dis­trib­ute it. If they turn your con­tent down for any rea­son, you not only can­not sell it with them, you also still are not allowed to sell it with any­one else. If you are absolutely sure that you are going to give your work away, I say, by all means, use iBooks Author. You will likely have a lot of fun putting the book together, and end up with a very good prod­uct. If, how­ever, you are invest­ing time cre­at­ing con­tent you hope to sell, even to dis­trib­ute as a perk for mem­ber­ship in a non-profit genealog­i­cal soci­ety, then I would say, wait a bit, and see if Apple is pres­sured by the out­rage of the com­mu­nity to soften this. (I can­not say that I have a lot of hope, because Apple has sev­eral dra­con­ian aspects to their con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion model already that peo­ple are clos­ing their nose and swal­low­ing, so … they may not change this either.

I usu­ally do not take polit­i­cal stands here on GenealogyMedia.com, but two pro­posed laws could have a chill­ing effect on the open­ness that has allowed the Inter­net to flour­ish. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, PDF) in the US House and Pro­tect Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty Act (PIPA, PDF) have the stated goals of pro­tect­ing prop­erty rights and stop­ing piracy of intel­lec­tual prop­erty. Most peo­ple do not dis­agree with those goals.

Please look into these laws, and con­tact your Con­gressper­son and your Sen­a­tors. We have plenty of laws to con­trol piracy, and do not need more. We espe­cially do not need laws designed to limit the secu­rity of the Domain Name Ser­vice by forc­ing Inter­net ser­vice providers and con­tent providers to remove links to or not direct traf­fic to sites accused of hav­ing allowed or par­tic­i­pated in piracy. This law sim­ply goes too far, and threat­ens the free dis­sem­i­na­tion of ideas that has made the Inter­net thrive. Twit­ter, Face­book, YouTube, GoogleReader, Red­dit, Word­Press, and Tum­blr are among some of the obvi­ous exam­ples of inno­v­a­tive web­sites that would not have been able to stay in busi­ness if con­stantly harassed by the kinds of laws that SOPA and PIPA represent.